The article omits some important stuff about how tax systems favour income derived from capital (capital gains, dividends, stock options) and how they allow corporate income to be shifted overseas before distribution to the shareholders.

The "liberum veto" sounds a lot like "consensus decision making". If even one member isn't on board, you start over.

Magoo, going off on a tangent here, that's one form of consensus decision-making. I've heard that it sometimes works well among people who have to live with each other and their decisions continuously. I've been a close witness of it not working, in the early Green Party in Ontario. Other forms are less rigourous, and more ingenious; but usually I think demanding of time.

Yes...after the heady days of anti globalization movements and the decentralist movements such as took place via the North American Bioregional Congress and the radical period of the Gtreen Party in Canada...we entered a dark time of ridicule of anyone not enamoured of the inevitability of globalization and the race to the bottom, to eliminate any movement for social justice and ecologic sustainability...but except for a fringe movement or 2, serious discussions of the alternatives to globalization are yet to emerge.....some hope in the call for the LEAP proposals at least here in BC

"On this week's episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges is joined by Russel Mokhiber, editor of Corporate Crime Reporter. They explore how corporations have used their money to take over non-profit organizations and regulatory agencies that once protected citizens from predatory corporate practices..."

Pretty good, except that I think "capitalism" is the wrong word; what's left of classical "socialism" isn't doing too well either. Something notable is that power is not a healthy goal. It is a truism among students of systems that systems seek primarily to maintain themselves; the interests of, say, "the people" are not very relevant. We might remember O'Brien's explanation of the workings of Ingsoc from "1984". The belief of neoclassical economists that all values can be translated into one measure (money) and so compared has been exploded but is still accepted. As a species we haven't learned to act collectively, we still depend on outside controls, even more than we did as hunter-gatherers. Once we were fairly well adapted to our environments, but we haven't learned to deal with scale changes. Can we learn?

One thing I think we ought to have learned by this time is that there are no perfect systems, they all have to be managed.

17-year-old boy shoots a 15-year-old stranger to death, apparently believing that the victim had given him a dirty look. A Chicago man stabs his stepfather in a fight over whether his entry into his parents’ house without knocking was disrespectful. A San Francisco UPS employee guns down three of his co-workers, then turns his weapon on himself, seemingly as a response to minor slights.

These killings may seem unrelated – but they are only a few recent examples of the kind of crime that demonstrates a surprising link between homicide and inequality.

A man thinks his girlfriend might be talking to other men on Facebook and kills her over the perceived insult to his pride. Is that really about inequality too?

A viable solution will have to omit energy profligacy, growth, and indefinite housing price increases. I recall that Harper refused to deal with the problem because his base was benefiting, if unsustainably. The federal Liberals have begun very gingerly to try to do something.

Part of the probablem is globalization and the flight of manufacturing from the U.S. and Canada, and the belief among enthusiasts for trade that either balance of payments deficits can be shoved under the rug indefinitely, or that people will tolerate large population movements and immiseration. Ricardo's position that trade benefited both partners was based on the assumption that capital and labout were not mobile, which has not been borne out. I'm not sure that he considered natural resources in any realistic way that would encompass say China's current importation of technoloy, coal, oil, iron ore and food on the strength of cheap labour

"In this episode of The Hudson Report, we speak with Michael Hudson about the implications of the flattening yield curve, the possibility of another global financial crisis and public banking as an alternative to the current system.'

..bill black explains how the 2008 collapse was nothing more than an extension of the savings & loan scandal that took place years earlier. and how nothing was really done about either..in a meaningful way. and that because nothing was done it continues into the future.

Parts 1 & 2What is the truth behind the 2008 Financial Collapse, why was no one prosecuted and how did Obama’s not prosecuting the “banksters” and strengthening Glass Steagal lead to Trump in the White House? Economist Bill Black joins us bring clarity to this mystery.

One of Slobodian’s main arguments is that neoliberals were not market ideologues in the sense of believing that private property and free trade were natural human relations, and that the role of the state was simply to get out of the way. This may have been the view of earlier liberals, but “what distinguished . . . the project of neoliberalism was that defending the world economy had to be . . . a proactive project.”

A strong state was needed to beat “back the attacks of the re-distributors.” An interesting question not addressed in the book is to what extent this need was really new. Historians of the earlier development of capitalism, such as Sven Beckert in his magnificent Empire of Cotton (2014), have emphasized the immense machinery of state violence and coercion that had to be employed to establish the rule of contract and property in the first place.

But Slobodian is right to identify a consistent position from the 1920s down to the present that a sovereign, democratic state cannot be relied on to defend the concentrated power and privilege of private property. If claims on the material world and on our collective labor are ultimately decided on by us all, shouldn’t they be distributed on some basis of equity or efficiency rather than whatever property titles happen to have been inherited from the past? In the mid-twentieth century, much of the world seemed ready to endorse Brecht’s closing lines in The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948): “That which there is shall belong to those who are good for it. . . . The carriages to the good drivers, that they are driven well; and the valley to the waterers, that they shall bear fruit.”

Against this the neoliberals offered a reinvigorated defense of property rights and a prioritization of law and procedure over consciously chosen outcomes. Their guiding principle was, in Tumlir’s words, a lack of “confidence in modern societies’ power of deliberate self-reform and self-regulation.”

It is not wrong to say these arguments served the interests of the wealthy; the Geneva school was closely tied to business and finance, and participants moved easily between academic settings and lobby groups such as the International Chamber of Commerce. Indeed, it was a French banker who coined the term neoliberal in the 1920s, and this connection with the concrete needs of business was one of the neoliberals’ great strengths, intellectually as well as politically.

But the project was also broader than that. One of Slobodian’s great insights is that the neoliberal program was not simply a move in the distributional fight, but rather about establishing a social order in which distribution was not a political question at all. For money and markets to be the central organizing principle of society, they have to appear natural—beyond the reach of politics.

"Naomi Prins, journalist and author of Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World,' talks to journalist Chris Hedges about how central bankers 'overstepped their traditional mandates by directing the flow of epic sums of fabricated money without any checks and balances."

"Peter Phillips returns to the Project Censored Show, this time as a guest, to discuss his new book, Giants: The Global Power Elite. The product of years of research, Giants identifies the members of the 'transnational capitalist class,' which includes the institutions and individuals that control trillions of dollars of the world's wealth and wield the political power that these riches confer."